Apparently, since the entire world can be characterized as a battlefield, it shall be treated like one according to law! Clauses like ‘worldwide indefinite detention without charge or trial’ seem to mean that if I, a Canadian citizen sitting at home in a country which is most definitely not at war with the US, were to engage in activity which looked suspicious enough, the US Senate would think it no big deal for its military to sneak in and kidnap me forever. That’s just fantastic. You know, there used to be a time when the US government respected us all enough to foist these tasks off onto clandestine CIA units. Those were the days…

This, of course, is the same US government which whined and moaned that China was controlling its currency and resources to benefit itself, rather than keeping the majority of its populace in poverty to benefit “fairness” (read: “US interests”). I used to know kids like that, who would change the rules every five minutes to ensure they won, and would cry, storm, punch, and kick at the unfairness of it all when they didn’t. I remember what happened to those kids. Nobody wanted to play with them anymore, and if the little brats started vengefully dropping rotten watermelons on their former playmates, mass chaos and kicks to the head were sure to ensue.

In this analogy, unfortunately, the US Congress and presidential administration is a 500 lb be-muscled kid with laser eyes and acid spit. Not invulnerable, but certainly a great deal scarier than the average psycho bully.

Oh, but how greatly the bully miscalculates! Sure, crazoid-imperialist-fascism has its appeal, and can take you very far in the short term, but the trouble with alienating and abusing everybody is that there is a lot more of “everybody” than there is of you. Especially when hundreds of millions of “everybody” lives inside your own borders and has been given no tempting reason to go along with an exercise in pure dumb-assery. This doesn’t mean the bully is a total idiot – far from it. From all that I can see, he’s doing his darned best to keep the populace scared, off-balance, and distracted in its domestic concerns. But as good a tactic as this seems in some respects, I think it’s probably just going to end up making the citizens even more angry.

Seriously, America. Don’t you know that you have to stir up a huge nationalist frenzy while you are trying to act in defiance of reason and human decency? It doesn’t work to whip up people’s emotions about hope and healing and “Yes We Can,” then totally forget about all that sentimental nonsense for a few years until Opposite Day when you can try to quietly sneak in the exact reverse of the sentiment that got you elected. You are really bad at this…I mean, it’s almost like most of your citizens are under the impression that democracy has great and far-reaching moral implications and standards. Kind of like you pretended to think during the election campaigns. Go figure!